onsite seo offsite seo search engine optimisation london

codastar / seo JARGON EXPLAINED - Turning clicks into business

SEO JARGON

SEO

Search engine optimisation (known as SEO) is the process of raising a website in the search engines (such as Google) rankings for the relevant searches terms for this website. For example, if you sell carpets in Watford, you may want to come as high as possible in the search engines rankings when the search "carpets watford" is performed.

The aim is to generate a targeted and relevant flow of traffic (potential customers) to your website.

The process of SEO is aimed at improving both the volume and the quality of traffic to a website from search engines in a "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") way. Of course, the higher a website appears in the search results of a search engine, the more visitors and ultimately sales / business enquiries it will receive.

On site SEO

A lot of work needs to be done on the website itself to make it optimum for search engines to "cache" (add to their database, and understand the exact relevance of each page). Many websites have a lot of issues that need to be worked on in order to make the website search engine friendly. Google (and others) change their requirements / settings very often and your website coding needs to keep up to date with those changes.

Of course, you will have heard about the "keywords" tags. Many businesses have been led to believe that the keywords are "the key" to success. This is nonsense. It is an important part, but it's in no way the deciding factor in getting your website to rank well for the searches that are relevant to you.

If it was that simple, we would just copy the keywords tags settings of the website that is listed number 1 on page 1, and theoretically, we would be able to compete straight away.
This is of course not the case.

We work on your keywords / tags of course, but we would also work on many coding aspects of your website as well as advise you on content changes that may be necessary / recommended to achieve your goals.

Onsite SEO allows for all technical issues as well as content to be resolved and optimised, so not only they will not interfere with the search engines, but you will get "extra points", and Google will have a greater understanding of the relevance of each page of your website and be able to match them better to a given search.

It is surprising to see how many SEO consultants seem to have poor understanding of onsite SEO, site maps, robots and other necessary tools to implement for optimum search engines rankings.

Good onsite SEO can make drastic improvements to your website rankings.

Off site SEO

In order to rank highly in the search engines, especially for the more competitive searches, a comprehensive SEO strategy is required. For the less competitive searches, we may very well achieve top rankings without doing any off site seo, simply via on site seo.
However, the more competitive the search terms, the more likely onsite search engine optimisation will not be sufficient.

This is where off-site SEO is required.

Essentially, we will need to build a vast network on incoming links, also known as backlinks. The quality of those links will also matter.

The way Search engines work, they see each link towards your website as "a vote of confidence". Your website value does increase by having other websites linking towards yours, and of course, so do your rankings.

Wherever possible, we build quality links from other websites that are relevant to your website content.

There are various ways of getting in links.
We work on all fronts for maximum results:

Article writing and posting
Web Directory submissions
Writing and syndicating PR articles
Blog posting & commenting
Social bookmarking
Forum posting and replying

All our link building is done ethically.

Theme based

This refers both to articles / press releases that we write for your company and post on other websites with links towards your website, and the websites where those articles are posted.

Basically, we want to ensure as much as this is possible to post articles on websites that have a similar content as your website. For instance, if you are in IT, we will look primarily at IT related websites, blogs, forums etc. to post those articles and links.

DMOZ

The Open Directory Project (ODP), also known as Dmoz is a huge database of website, a very big directory, which is used by many search engines to source websites. Its multilingual open content is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors.

Being listed on the DMOZ directory requires manual submissions and the submission is carefully reviewed by DMOZ editors. However, it can take many, many month before your website is reviewed and included in the directory.

Backlinks

Simply another way of calling links placed on a website linking to your website. Also called "in links", "incoming links" and variations.

How do I evaluate the competitiveness of my search terms?

This is a difficult thing to do. It is really best to ask us to research this for you.
We can give you an idea to evaluate, but then again, this can be very deceptive if the websites listed on the first couple of pages are all very well optimised.

Try this:
When you search your desired search in Google, it will returns the results, and on the top right corner Google will tell you how many results are available for that search for example, if you search "web design London", Google will list this in the top right corner:
Results 1 - 10 of about 33,900,000 for web design London. (0.34 seconds)

Roughly, you can estimate a competitive search this way (once again, it's just a basic way of doing this. we have much more sophisticated and accurate ways of knowing, so ask us please!)

Not very competitive search – less than half a million competing results
Competitive search - 1-10 million competing results
Very competitive search - 10-50 million competing results
Ultra competitive search – 50 million + competing results

What are articles?

Articles are general articles about your industry. They are not press releases about your company.

For example, if we were posting articles for a web design company, we would write 2 or 3 articles about web design in general, the technological advances etc. and use the words in the article to link towards the web design company website. For instance, we would link words such as "web design", "corporate website design" etc. to the web design company website.

This way we are using highly relevant "anchor text" to create the links, instead of simply writing the company's web address as the link.

GOOGLE PR - High PR

PR (Page rank)

PR is a Google specific tool named "PageRank".
Rather confusingly, it has nothing to do with your actual ranking on Google pages.
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm created by the Google that analyses in depth the links coming into a particular website and defines a "numerical value" that can be attributed to that website.

This value ranges between1 and 10 and represents how important a website may be. Google understands the fact that when one website links to another, in effect it is casting a vote for the website it is linking to.

So, Google will give a "PR value" to each website it has on its database and this PR value will have relevance in the rankings of your website on Google’s pages.

Rather annoyingly, Google only update (or publish the update) of their PR rankings at random intervals, usually every quarter but it can take longer, so PRrank value is something we work towards medium term rather than short term.